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Out for a spin

This weekend the handyman dropped by to see about some repairs (which I don't want to go into right now, because ARGH!). He told me before he came over that he was going to be taking his car out, because it hadn't been driven in a while. Usually he drives an old ambulance which has been modified for handyman use (out with the medical stuff, in with the piles of tools), and I just thought, "oh, whatever" and didn't consider the implications.

So on Sunday afternoon, I heard the roar of an engine out front. I stepped outside to see … the handyman, in his best bib overalls, a fine straw hat, and a two-tone 1929 Mercedes roadster. Oz had left the house a few minutes before, and a good thing too, because he'd have turned green and melted onto the bricks in a big puddle of envy. He likes a good straw hat and he would probably have liked the car too.

And, apropos of nothing: a dramatic moment at the monkey-cam.

My hair is not green

I finally received my new passport.

It is not chipped! The office that processed my renewal was not yet equipped to issue the new RFID passports. If you want a non-hackable passport, it seems that you can still get them. Also, the old passport design is much classier. Check out the State Department's flash animation of the new "e-Passport" and see if you agree. The NASA image inside the back cover is okay though.

After all that effort to get a good passport photo, I was kind of disappointed to see what they did to it. Nowadays, instead of laminating your photo to the cover, they scan your photo and print it directly on the cover. Or, rather, they scan your photo, shade it green, and then print it on the cover. Then they laminate everything with holographically watermarked plastic so that you have an arrow fletching on your nose.

Oh well. It's not the worst ID I've ever had.

So long and thanks for all the work!

It's so much fun being a white collar day-laborer.

Last week the client who sends me a nice steady flow of translation work (as opposed to the other clients, who send me work occasionally) announced that they are eliminating their translation division. I suppose they noticed that the translation division wasn't making any money. Oh well.

But they like my work and if they start buying translations again, they'll totally call me.

Um. Thanks.

I finished up the last bit of work for them on Wednesday. Thursday I did chores. Friday, I faced up to the wonderful world of un(der)employment. Now I really have no excuse not to look for a job, which I haven't been doing actively because job hunting sucks and because I've had money coming in. So on Friday I applied for a proper grown-up type job (also, chores and errands). The plan for Monday? More of the same.

It's grueling, I tell you. Somehow I'm going to have to work in some kicking back and nibbling bon-bons.

Richmond leads the way

Richmond's police department gets a nod from the New York Times in an article on data mining.

Come for a visit!

What with all the recent festivities celebrating 400 years of white folks in Virginia and the Queen's visit, the Washington Post has glanced briefly southward and noticed that there is a city here. A city with things to do in it.

After three years of renovation and restoration, the state capitol has reopened to visitors. We should go. I've been on the capitol grounds many times, but never inside.

They also found a few other cultural and historical offerings, including the Virginia Center for Architecture, which I'm ashamed to say I hadn't even heard of.

And unlike the article on their last visit, the Post reporters didn't mention boozing it up for cheap even once.

I'm not inclined to vandalism

But every time I walk past a Hummer, I feel the urge to key it.

Everyone have a good Mother's Day?

Fisheye view of a foxglove, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

Pitcher plants in bloom

So, should I read anything into this? Mom and I go to the botanical garden on Mother's Day and my two favorite flower pictures are of a foxglove, the plant which so frequently appears in murder mysteries as the strychnine vector, and the blossom of a carnivorous plant. I was especially taken with the pitcher flowers, which I'd never seen in bloom before. They're so alien looking with the shield thingy in the center. Mom took a lot of flower photos (in lieu of taking cuttings) (which she has done there before). She's been really psyched with the flower photography since I showed her how to put her little point-and-shoot camera in macro (flower) mode.

As you can see, the weather was unreally beautiful. Perfect for eating brunch outside in the shade (except that a bird pooped on Mom). Perfect for a garden walk. Perfect for Oz hiding in the kitchen all afternoon and making chicken gizzard stew.

But wait, there's more

Just so you don't think I have to drug my cats to find a little cheer, here are some more cheerful things.

One of the suck things that happened earlier this week was my car springing a coolant leak. Such a lack of consideration, especially since I bought it a new radiator last month. I took it back to the shop and they discovered that the leak was from a clamp which had worked loose. They tightened it up, did a pressure check, and today they delivered my car to my house, saving me a walk down to Shockoe Bottom, where the shop is. Also, no charge (they're the ones who did the radiator). Island Import Service is now officially our favorite garage.

Today I finished my allotted work before lunchtime. Since I have no need to get ahead on this assignment, I took the afternoon off. I did no chores.

Tonight at the bookstore we found a marked down book on cemetery iconography. Very handy for when you just have to know why they put chipmunks on tombstones. I looked through the section on animals and found that all the cute furry creatures we like best are symbols of Satan! I had no idea we were aligned with the dark powers.

On Wednesday, a day with more than its share of suckage, we had wildly scattered showers which gave us fabulous and varied thunderheads, many of which had my favorite bunny shape.

Grasping

Sucky things have been happening this week. I almost wish I could go back to Monday and start over, just to see if the week might turn out better, except that I wouldn't want to go through all this again. This is just everyday bad stuff, nothing truly disastrous, but things seem worse than they are when they all happen at once.

So I will try to find something cheerful to write about.

Today I received some pet supplies that I ordered on Tuesday—they arrived really fast! That's something to be cheerful about. The vendor threw in a sample packet of catnip, fresh enough that even I could smell it through the plastic. I placed the packet on a table in the living room, where the cats were napping on the couch. A few minutes later, Monte Alban was hopping up on the table and getting involved.

The involvement lasted for an hour. Maybe two? Sparky wanted at the catnip and they took turns. They're so funny about catnip, especially all the furtive looks over their shoulders, like they think they're doing something naughty and big mean Cat Mom is going to fuss at them. Then they go right back to licking and gnawing on the packet. There was quite a lot of drool this time (that must have been some seriously good nip). Rolling. Lolling. Catnip scattered upon (and drooled into) the runner. The whole works.

I'm glad somebody had some fun around here today.

Sticker shock

I finally talked to a real live roof guy, who looked at my roof and gave me a ballpark number for the cost of a new metal roof with rebuilt cornices to correct the rotting boards and spots in the gutters where the water pools.

It's, oh, about twice what I was expecting. But that's for a proper hundred year roof, not a ten or twenty year roof which (I hope) would be a better match for my saving account. What to do?

I think I'll rescind my New Year's resolution to get a new roof and replace it with a resolution to keep saving up for a new roof, keep dithering about what roof to get, and keep obsessing about the gutters. Yeah, that's a plan. I'm really good at all those things too, seeing as how I've got years of practice.

One thing I'm not good at? Standing on one foot with my eyes closed and without falling over. I am offended by this and therefore I shall practice until I stop falling over. See, I started doing a walking tai chi form to strengthen my legs and improve my balance. Easy peasy. Then I tried doing it with my eyes closed and nearly fell over. How can that be? Are my inner ears lazy or defective? Why do I need visual cues for verticality when there's all that gravity around to tell me which way is down? Regardless, I'm going to work on my blind balance. I have noticed that I'm wobbly when I walk around in the dark (I didn't used to be), so this is a worthy project for safety reasons. It's not that I'm weird. Or not just that I'm weird.

Lastly, Hell. I'm in roof hell, but that may very well be better than …

Hello Kitty Hell. (via)

Somebody had to be living it.

Beautiful days

The roller girl restored, at the Dream Roller Rink, on Chincoteague Rd, New Church, Virginia

(Okay, that picture's a couple weeks old, but that was a beautiful day too.)

We are getting one last reprieve from the summer heat. Saturday was cool, cloudy with drizzle. I hope the weather was clearer in Kentucky, where they took Queen Elizabeth II for the Kentucky Derby rather than keeping her here for the NASCAR races in Richmond.

Even with the rain, Sparky insisted on going outside to nibble on the grass and muddy his paws. I hung out with him, nibbling on spearmint leaves (as close as I got to a mint julep). From now till October, the sun is too strong for me to spend many midday hours outside, but in the drizzle I am safe from the sun. We need to consider moving north.

Still, we didn't work in the yard. We ran errands: kitty litter, toilet paper, laundry detergent. We went to the bookstore and got fluff to read. Not all of the fluff made it into the bag at the store! We found a book missing when we unloaded our catch at home. Naturally it was the trashiest looking book of a very trashy lot. We went back to the bookstore today to ask for a copy of the book we bought. Oz pointed out that the worst part of the process was having to admit to picking that trashy book. Twice.

But the sympathetic clerk I spoke with only said, "Oh, no! That always happens to me at the grocery store." The bookstore has a system for dealing with this situation. They bag and tag all the books this happens to, and keep them behind the counter. My book was at the top of a very large pile, not one day's worth, I hope. You'd think getting the books into the bags would be the easy part of the job.

Somehow over the course of the errands and other activities, Oz started rhapsodizing about chicken gizzards and the rhapsody turned into a quest for gizzards and gizzard stew. The market didn't have gizzards for sale, but they did have chicken livers and other chicken parts. Oz spent this afternoon dismembering vegetables and chicken organs and made a chicken liver stew, quite tasty, if you like liver. After I don't know how many bowls, Oz declared, "I am a soup genius."

I have a hunch that Gizzard Quest 2007 will continue.

The horror!

We are still excited about having new locks. Even Oz. When I called him this morning he was all jolly about it. This evening he installed the final new doorknob when he came home from work. I made a pile of all the keys we don't need anymore. Front door, back door, car I haven't had for nearly three years … It's a lot of keys. I suppose we should do something ceremonial, but we will probably just pitch them.

Amazing banality on Japanese TV. This really should not surprise me. Last Friday they aired a celebrity show, "This Evening with Kiyoshi", which was basically Romper Room-type activities with musical interludes so the viewers can watch the celebrities being celebrities. Oh, the banality! This show was vapid even by the truly jaw-dropping standards of vapidity proudly maintained by TV Japan. I thought it was a special (a very special special) until this evening when the next episode came on. Oh joy. It's weekly. Maybe that will encourage us to get out of the house more.

Inspired by this lolcat, I pulled out a tape measure and wrapped it around my fat kitty. Sparky too has the same waist measurement as Kate Moss.

Fit for a queen

Around here, we get our excitement where we can.

I am therefore excited to report that it rained! And the new drainage pipe did its thing! I actually went out into the deluge to watch water drip out the end of the pipe. Moreover, since the water was being carried away from the house, the interior humidity was about five percentage points lower than it usually during a rainstorm. I need to collect a little more data before I can be sure that we'll have a consistent reduction in humidity. Our next water-related project will be a proper downspout for the porch roof.

My other thrill was receiving the new locks I ordered. The evening before we left for Chincoteague, the deadbolt on the front door failed. Fortunately it held together long enough for me to get it unlocked one final time, so we didn't have to call a locksmith to get into the house. We did have to immediately run over to the home supply store and get a new deadbolt, at which point Oz's car failed to start, boding really well for our trip. After we came home from the Eastern Shore (with no further mishaps, oddly enough), I decided that it would be nice to have all the exterior locks keyed the same. My house has two exterior doors, each with a locking entry doorknob and a deadbolt, each of which requires a different key. (This is doubtless the work of the same chucklehead who set up the roof to drain under the porch.) The home store sells other locks and doorknobs keyed to match the lock we just bought, but they didn't have the kind I wanted. But the Internet did!

So now we have shiny new locks. When I signed for the package, the UPS man asked if I was going to see the queen. (Queen Elizabeth II is in Virginia this week to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown and to cause traffic problems for commuters.) Hah. No. I was working today and I'm not enough of a Queen-o-phile to brave the crowds and the drizzle.

I called Oz and said, "Yay! The locks came! Isn't that exciting?"

He said, "Oh. That's excitement, huh?"

Yes. It is, especially in comparison to the hairball I found on the couch this morning.

I need to get out more.

A few hours later …

Well, we did get out. When Oz went to install the new deadbolt on the back door, he found that the old deadbolt was held in with hex screws, not Philips head like all the other locks. I said, "Don't you have a hex set? Isn't that, like, a requirement of manhood?" He said, "No, I got rid of a houseful of stuff when I moved in here. Argh. All my tools …" Oh, honey.

So, back to the home store we went. That's like going out, right? I mean, Tool World! El mundo de las herramientas! (I love the bilingual signage.) Now he has two pocket hex sets, metric and English, and we have the new locks installed on the back door. Darkness fell before he could replace the front doorknob, but by tomorrow evening we'll be a single key household.